


Hydrophore

by orphan_account



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, Help even idk what's going on here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-08-14 14:56:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8018446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reno takes a stint of leave in Costa, finds a familiar face. Post Doc, but just barely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hydrophore

**Author's Note:**

> Other content warnings: tone/style that may ping dissociative, vague suicidal ideation

The surface is too far.

White light dancing through blue, currents he can see. It's bright, and light, and beautiful.

And too far away.

He can't even kick towards it. Can't even climb. Muscles loose and chest burning now. Needs to breathe. Knows if he does it's the last breathe he'll ever take.

The last bad decision? The last risk evaluated, and discarded on purpose?

He can see the sun still, through the water. Dots of bright white light that shift and break, that grow and bend with the waves, with swimmers and surfers. He wonders that he can't see any of them here.

With seconds slowed down, slow-moving.

Where is he?

He would climb.

He would swim but nothing works now. Too tired.

Too bright.

He tells his body not to breath but it does anyway. A lungful of water gasping and heavy and salt-burned. Vision going dark at the edges.

Light.

__

Light is what he wakes in. Face pressed into a couch cushion and it's the first thing he registers. Dancing at the edges of not quite vision.

Early morning summer white, when he manages to crack an eye. Unfamiliar. Comforting. Doesn't feel real.

Ocean sounds.

Salt-air, and coffee. Same as yesterday. Same as the two before that.

...Coffee.

Same as the two before that. And one before. And before.

He rolls off the couch, leaves his jacket thrown over the back of it, pads towards the kitchen.

She has windows open and the blinds up, spilling morning in.

“You don't gotta let me sleep, y'know.” He steps around her where she is pulling down mugs, reaches over her to fetch plates.“Sorta invited myself in an' all.”

“You don't have to sleep on the couch, you know.” If she minds him in her space like this, she doesn’t show it. Just steps back when he does and ducks when he stretches, and generally makes room for him. Makes spaces for him to feel useful when breakfast is something she is more than capable of managing on her own. “I have a guest room.”

“An' I got a hotel room. I like the couch.” He sets plates on the table, and forks and knives. Sets a hot pad on the table next to them, like he’s learned how to live there.

She just hums at that, just turns towards the windows for a moment and he follows her gaze to the sun.

“You could cancel it.”

“Why, yo?” She fries eggs and presses down toast, and he gathers salt and hot sauce from where he’s learned they live. “ S’only like a couple of days.” Before she can offer an answer.

He sets himself down at the table and out of the way while she pours coffee, then hurries back to the skillet which is popping and hissing in her absence. It’s strange.

Usually he’s the one doing that.

Usually for the person neither of them has managed to mention by name the last half-week. “What we doing today?”

“Errands.” She pulls the pan and everything in it off the flame, sets it instead on the hotpad, and sits down across from him. Her coffee is in her free hand. His sits on the counter and he leaves it there, exactly like he’s been doing. “And you?”

“Hmm. Might go swim later. Wanna join?” Taking his fork and prodding at the pan, to little effect. A piece of bacon moved a few centimeters right. An egg that’s started to look a little offended, at this angle. The toast at least, she had brought with her and doled out.

“Tomorrow.” She sips her coffee, serves herself, and makes no move to help him. Better, because they’re grinning at each other for it. Because it would be too weird, for things to be really and truly gentle between them, comfort or no. “It’s supposed to be a cold-water day today.” She offers, conciliatory, “Warm tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

She makes no move to stop him either when he just tips what’s left onto his plate. “Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Promise you’ll try hot sauce on your eggs, yo?”

“Promise you’ll try salt?”

Neither makes a single move for the others topping, and neither mentions it beyond that. It feels easy now, ritualistic. Not like three days. Four? They each take their silence for a while, and it hurts nothing.

Reno makes the next move. Casual.

“Put his number in for you.” He slides her PHS across the table like he's passing salt, or butter. Like she'd forgotten it somewhere rather than leaving it charging on her own kitchen counter.

“I don’t think-” But she starts to reach for it automatically, before she catches herself.

“He thinks he killed you, yo. Got you killed anyway. If I was him I'd wanna know that ain't the case.” Curiosity, not judgement, “Wouldn't you?”

She takes the phone from him. She doesn’t open it.

“I just need a few days.”

“Okay.”  
__  
Salt in his mouth, in his eyes. Stinging.

Pausing.

Treading water.

Blue and bright.

The shore looks so much farther than he’d thought but…

But how tired is he, really?

He kicks out again. Presses on.  
__  
She’s got a white sundress on, another one, more flow to the skirt than the first and he, he isn’t looking at the line her legs make. He’s a little distracted by the rise of pink on her shoulders. By the patterns of sand pressed into her skin that she doesn’t bother to brush away. By the not-quite-silhouette she cuts, between blue bright sky, and blue deep waves.

Walking back along the boardwalk, weighed down with grocery bags, one on each shoulder each, and another slung between them. Ice pops and soda pop and just plain ice. The sun shares the sky with the moon this time of year and the beaches are full. Bathing towels and umbrellas, and sandcastles.

A handful of kids charge past them, shouting. They step aside but only just. Stumbling. Laughing because they can. Because it's already an easy rhythm to recover. Waiting for something to follow, though neither knows what.

His phone rings. He doesn’t answer. He isn’t the one carrying it. It's only his personal, after all.

“He's calling you.”

“Pick it up. I don't mind, yo.”

“He's calling you, Reno. Does he even know you're here?”

“M' on leave. Answer it if it bothers you so much.” She looks at him, annoyed, and he looks back, measured. “I ain't gonna tell your secrets."

She lets it ring.

He lets her. 

They walk back passed his hotel room, back to her apartment and her AC and her fridge. They put melting things away and dry things out of reach, and they do not draw the curtains, or close the windows.

__

He strikes out. Dives from the dock and hits the water, warmer than it looks, and carries himself on sure strokes from salt air to salt water and the spaces in between. Feels light. Sees light when he remembers that he is supposed to have his eyes open.

He isn't sure what he's doing.

He isn't sure what to do.

He could go home.

He probably won't.

Thinks maybe, he never planned to. Thinks maybe he’s not the one to ask. Doesn't think.

Waves hit him, the tide coming in, and he cuts through them easily; muscle memory and even breathing.

Old Memory: hands under his shoulders, in the water, fingers calloused and voice low-rough. Comforting _'Breathe. It will help you float. Don't be scared of it.'_

New Memory: a hand that actually fits in his. A white dress. Sandy skin. Frustrating. _'You know, I grew up in Midgar too. I'm still not sure that I'm not afraid of the water. Can you think of anything more silly? I could stand between AVALANCHE and the ShinRa and I could turn away from both, but I still don't know how to swim.'_

He can outswim both of them, he thinks, if he can swim as fast as he runs.

If he can swim out far enough.

__

__Day one of leave. Horrifically bored. Following information he thought he knew to be false. For something to do. For nothing to do. For a habit he ought to have killed by now._ _

__Day one and he catches sight of her, doing her damnedest not to catch sight of him. And because he can't quite seem to wrap his head around either of them being real, he decides that neither of them gets to sideline on this one._ _

__“So I got this question an’ I'm hoping you can tell me, yo.” He takes the stool next to hers, and waves for the bartender. “Don't anybody stay dead anymore?”_ _

__But he doesn't close in, when he sees her startle, and she doesn't run._ _

__He thinks she wants to, but she doesn't._ _

__Spy._ _

__Ancient history._ _

__Fresh wound. Old wound._ _

__Pretty girl in a pretty bar. Bright eyes and sun-kissed hair and white dress, like you never saw in Midgar. Too much pollution._ _

__He's got half his first drink in hand still. He uses it to drown bad blood._ _

__Years and years and years and…_ _

__“Can't speak for everyone,” she doesn't run. She doesn't avoid his eyes, even though her fingers are nervous on her glass. This endears her to him immensely. “Turk?”_ _

__“Off duty.”_ _

__A pause. The bartender waiting. Awkward. He puts a hand down hard on the counter._ _

__Then her, looking down._ _

__“Me too.”_ _

__It's not defeat. That's what makes him give a shit. What makes him stay._ _

__“Whatchya drinking, girly?”_ _

__He can't remember who paid for them, in the end._ _

__He can remember stars, when they stumbled outside, as many as he had ever seen._ _

__Can remember blackening the eye of someone who had an ugly word her way when she wouldn't take a gifted drink._ _

__Can remember her taking his without his offering._ _

__Can remember names they hadn't said, because they didn't need to.  
___ _

__She swings in a balcony hammock, while the sun is not yet low, a book in hand. She works. He knows that she works. He knows also that she has the luxury, these days, to set a schedule herself. Teaches environment on the part time. Fitting._ _

__He sets a drink on the deck chair nearest to her reach. Sets a glass of water there too._ _

__It had threatened, for a moment that day, to get stormy. Clouds on the skyline, the smell of rain. Passing._ _

__Threatened enough though that she had closed the glass over the screen door, only to open it again when the sun held strong, and the breeze didn’t falter._ _

__“M’going out, yo.”_ _

__“Ocean?” She makes to put her book down, to look at him, but seems to catch herself._ _

__“Ocean. Don’t get you. It’s right there.”_ _

__“You get used to it.”_ _

__“Not me, yo.”_ _

__“Watch your phone?”_ _

__“Watch my phone.”  
___ _

__Two phones on the table._ _

__Waiting, and waiting, and waiting._ _

__His rings, hers doesn’t. Hers hasn’t in days. It eats at her like sunlight on wide stretches of sand. Like glare on water._ _

__It rings and dies once._ _

__It rings again._ _

__This time, she answers._ _

__“...Rude?”_ _

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Calorify](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8029024) by [TwoCatsTailoring](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwoCatsTailoring/pseuds/TwoCatsTailoring)




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